The Real Women of Philadelphia have created a community all their own, and they’re in the midst of compiling a community cookbook.  It’s a unique collection of recipes- all made with Philadelphia Cream Cheese.  Home cooks everywhere:  you’re encouraged to submit your own creations, with the chance for your recipe to be included in this grand community cookbook and take home $500 too!

  

Community-inspired cookbooks have been around quite a long time.    The first community cookbooks surfaced around the time that the Civil War was ending in 1865—as a collaborative effort to raise money for wounded soldiers and their families.  Long before the days of big-selling cookbooks, Americans began to rely on recipe collections developed by communities.  I’ve got quite a few of these community cookbooks in my always-expanding cookbook collection, and I must say that they’re the ones I treasure most.  In them, you’ll find some of the best home cooking recipes you’ve ever come across… recipes that are diverse and cover all skill levels.  A couple of weeks ago, a distant cousin of mine sent me a community cookbook that was once in the kitchen of my Great Aunt Dorothy.

 
Tears streamed down my face as I flipped through this tattered & torn, small booklet of recipes, interspersed with prayers and poems, from a tiny town in Minnesota.  It’s dated 1964.
 
As I turned the pages and read the recipes, what I noticed most was that the recipe instructions, ingredients and even measurements were sometime pretty vague—a clear sign that women in those days were indeed expected to know how to cook already.  What became evident to me was that these women (all women) were proud to share their family’s recipes, many of which have probably been passed around the family for years to come.  I really got a kick out of finding quite a few recipes that utilized Philadelphia Cream Cheese—not so surprising since Philadelphia Cream Cheese dates back to 1872!

 
If you’d like a chance to become a part of the Real Women of Philadelphia community cookbook, check out the RWoP site for weekly challenge details on how to submit your original recipe.  I encourage you to get involved in this fabulous community of cooks by visiting the site and exploring the recipes.  With such a wide variety of contributors who all have very different styles of cooking, I have a feeling that this community cookbook is going to become another treasure on cookbook shelves everywhere.